This Paper reports a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing all first year requirements before the start of their second academic year. Participants were assigned to a high reward...

A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from experiments in laboratories and non-experimental studies exploiting sports or firm data. Selection of competitors across tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies,...

In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a...

This paper estimates the effects of attending medical school on health outcomes by exploiting that admission to medical school in the Netherlands is determined by a lottery. Among the applicants for medical school, people who attended medical school have on average 1.5 more years of completed...

This paper follows an alternative approach to identify the wage effects of private-sector training. The idea is to narrow down the comparison group by only taking into consideration the workers who wanted to participate in training but did not do so because of some random event. This makes the...

This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidies targeted at schools with large proportions of disadvantaged pupils. The first scheme gives primary schools with at least 70% disadvantaged minority pupils extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives primary schools with at least 70%...